Louisa works as Research Associate on the Art & Inequality in the Shadow of the Black Death project (PI Prof. Sam Cohn), for which she employs palaeography and data analysis skills as well as art historical expertise to research testamentary dispositions from late medieval and early Renaissance Umbria and Venice.

Louisa's wider research centres on the devotional art and material culture of late medieval and Renaissance Europe, with a particular focus on Italy. Broadly speaking, she considers conjunctions between material, meaning and function, as well as how workshop organisation and practice relate to technical and aesthetic exchanges across media. She has experience of teaching history of art, palaeography and language skills, digital humanities techniques and research skills to a range of audiences from undergraduates to GLAM professionals. Trained with a Theology degree from KCL and an MA in Art History from UCL, Louisa also hold an MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture and a LAHP-funded PhD (2023) in History of Art, both from the Warburg Institute. 

Outside of academia, Louisa is regular correspondent for The Times, and also contributes to other outlets, with a focus on arts, culture, history and fashion. Find out more here. 

Louisa's earlier work re-evaluated the place of wax sculpture in the wider fine and decorative arts of fifteenth-century Florence through the lens of the wax ex-voto. This is also the subject of her first monograph, which is forthcoming. Interested in how digital humanities techniques can be harnessed to aid art historical research, Louisa also developed an interactive digital map of Florentine wax workshops in the period 1300 to 1500. 

A key aspect of Louisa’s work is an interest in materiality and its implications for how objects were perceived and used. As such, in 2020 she co-founded the ongoing lecture and seminar series, A Material World, which focuses on the reconstruction of life in the past through objects and materials, the people who made them and the people who used them. 

Other longstanding interests include strategies by which individual and corporate identity was visualised in late medieval and Renaissance Italy, with particular reference to monastic orders in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Prizes, awards & distinctions

• 2020: PhD Studentship (AHRC/LAHP)

Professional & learned societies

• 2023: Associate Fellow, Royal Historical Society